Lite
Araby
Themes:
●Lost of innocence
●Coming of age
●Romantic infatuation vs religious
●Death of medieval
●Romance
●Obsession with exotic culture
Literary elements:
●Characterization
●Imagery
●Point of view
●Diction
●Symbolism (religious)
●Type of narration
How do you WIN someone’s heart?
James Joyce, the author, examines this inescapable and often painful aspect of adolescence.
Text analysis: First-person point of view.
“Araby” is a celebrated coming-of-age story written in first person point of view.
●Features a narrator who speaks directly to readers.
●Uses the pronouns/ and me.
●Sees everything through the narrator’s eyes.
The narrator and main character of “Araby” is an impressionable boy living in Dublin at the turn of the 20th century. His comments convey emotional, intensity.
All times, the boy does not fully understand what he sees or feels. such a narrator is called a naïve narrator.
Reading skill: Analyze Descriptive Details.
Joyce uses a wealth of descriptive details, or colorful words and phrases, to help readers to understand both the narrator’s real circumstances and his fanciful imaginings.
Vocabulary in context:
- Imperturbable: adj. not able to be excited or disturbed; impassive.
- incessant: adj. continuing or seeming to continue without stopping.
- innumerable: adj. too many to be counted.
- garrulous: adj. talking a lot or too much, especially about unimportant things.
- pervade: v. to be prevalent throughout.
- Araby short story by James Joyce
●Biography: James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and short story writer. He published Portrait of the Artist in 1916 and caught the attention of Ezra Pound. With Ulysses, Joyce perfected his stream-of-consciousness style and became a literary celebrity. The explicit content of his prose brought about landmark legal decisions on obscenity. Joyce battled eye ailments for most of his life and he died in 1941.
●Purpose for reading: the narrator’s love for the object of his affection.
●Background: On May 14, 1894, a five-day charity bazaar came to the city of Dublin. The bazaar was called Araby, where bazaars (markets with long rows of stalls or shops) are common. For the children of Dublin, Arabia seemed a mysterious, exotic place, very different from the dark, all-too-real streets of the dreary city in which they lived.
Voc.:
- blind: a dead end.
- The Abbot… Vidocq: Three widely different 19th-century works. The first a historical novel, the second a book of religious instruction, and the third an autobiography of a French police detective.
- ran the… cottages: passed through an area of hostility or attack from the rough crowd living in the cottages.
- come-all-you… Rossa: a ballad about Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, an Irish hero who fought against British rule in the 19th century.
- chalice: The communion chalice, or cup, commemorates the one used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, a chalice sometimes called the Holy Grail.
- Impinge: hit; strike.
- Freemason: having to do with the Free and Accepted Masons, a worldwide charitable and social organization. In Ireland its members were almost exclusively Protestant and were often hostile to catholics (like the aunt).
- misgave: Caused to feel doubt or anxiety.
- The Arab’s… Steed: a popular 19th century poem by Caroline Norton.
- Florin: a former British coin worth 2 shillings, or 24 pence.
- gas: gaslight.
- Café Chantant French: “singing café”, a café providing musical entertainment.
- salver: serving tray.
- Theme:
Progress
Text analysis: Persuasion
Technique:
●Logical appeal: this technique uses reason and evidence to support a position.
●Emotional appeal: This technique creates strong feelings, such as fear and anger, to influence readers’ opinions.
●Ethical appeal: This technique refers to values and principles which the reader is likely to believe in strongly.
Reading skill: Recognize ideas
Victorian writers use complex sentence filled with phrases, clauses, and modifiers.
Strategies:
●Clarify meaning by identifying the main subject and verb of a sentence.
●Watch for patterns in the text, such as repeated sentence structures, that the author uses to organize thoughts.
●Once you identify the idea of a passage,reread it. Consider the details you initially skipped over.
- Debase: v. To lower in value, quality, or dignity; to cheapen.
- Prophesy: v. To predict (something) by or as if by divine guidance.
- Defray: v. To furnish money for.
- Lucrative: adj. Producing wealth or profit.
- Countenance: n. Face; facial expression.
- Stoicism: n. Indifference to pleasure or pain.
Evidence of Progress
●Critical commentary by Thomas Babington Macaulay
●Background: Industrialism brought sweeping changes to Victorian society. The invention of the steam engine in the 1780s helped create a new kind or workplace— the factory. The development of railways in the 1830s led to the growth of large industrial towns, where hundreds of thousands of workers migrated in search of work. Critics of industrialism focused on the plight of these workers. But other commentators celebrated the economic growth enabled by these technological advances. Macaulay, writing in 1830, found reasons for optimism in the midst of these rapid and unsettling changes.
●Purpose for reading: To determined its author’s view on the validity of this statement: “Progress has its price.”
●Voc.:
1.A war that make others insignificance: Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1792-1815)
2.Sussex and Huntingdonshire… West Riding of Yorkshire: two former counties in southeastern England, and the western section of Yorkshire, a large county in northern England.
3.Ben Nevis and Helvellyn: mountains in Britain. Ben Nevis is located in Scotland; Helvellyn, in the Lake District of northwestern England.
4.Crash in 1720: The financial crisis known as the Sea Bubble, caused by the overvaluation of stock in the South Sea Company.
5.More into the exchequer… customs: More into the treasury than taxes on domestic and imported goods.
6.Charles the Second: king of England from 1660 to 1685.
7.Sailing without wind… ride without horses: Traveling on steamships and beginning to travel on railroads.
8.Gulliver’s Travels: The fanciful satire by Jonathan Swift, published in 1726.
9.Fee-simple…Plantagenets: complete ownership of the Plantagenet estates. The House of Plantagenet was the royal dynasty that ruled as Lord Protector from 1653- 1658.
10.Elizabeth… Cromwell: Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled England from 1558 to 1603, and Oliver Cromwell, who ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658.
11.Forty shillings… voter: In Macaulay’s time, only males with a certain minimum income were able to vote in Britain. A shilling was a unit of currency equal to 1/ 20 of a pound.
12.Junius… Lord Chatham: William Pitt the Elder, the politician who led Britain into the costly Seven Years’ War with France, was named Earl of Chatham in 1766. Junius was the pen name of a political commentator who usually supported Pitt.
13.Pitt, Fox, and Burke: William Pitt the Younger(Second son of William Pitt the Elder), Charles James Fox, and Edmund Burke, British political leaders of the late 18th century.
The Condition of England
●Critical Commentary by Thomas Carlyle
●Under the old Poor Law, each English parish gave the poor in its jurisdiction “outdoor relief” so that families could support themselves. In 1834, to reform abuses of this system, Parliament passed the Poor Law Amendment Act, which established a national system of workhouses for the poor. All able-bodied residents were required to work each day, often at useless tasks such as shredding rope, digging holes, or scrubbing already clear floors. Writing in 1843, Carlyle used life in the workhouse to illustrate the negative impact of industrialism on Britain.
●Purpose for reading: To determine its author’s view on the validity of the statement “Progress has its price.”
●Voc:
- Inanition: Lack of spirit or vitality; loss or absence of social, moral, or intellectual vigor.
- Baleful fiat: harmful decree or law.
- Master-workers… master idlers: Carlyle’s somewhat scornful terms for industrialists who employ other workers and for those wealthy enough, generally through inheritance, to live on rents, interest, and/or stock dividends without needing to work at all.
- Bastille: Prison. The Bastille was the famous royal prison destroyed by a mob at the start of the French Revolution in 1789.
- Work cannot be done in them: In this paragraph, Carlyle uses work to refer to gainful or useful employment.
- Impotences: weakness; inabilities.
- Dante’s hell: The italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) gives a detailed account of hell, which he calls the Inferno, in the first book of his classic work The Divine Comedy.
- Thrifty Scotland… Glasgow or Edinburgh City: The people of Scotland have a longstanding reputation for being thrifty. Glasgow and Edinburgh are Scotland’s two largest cities.
- Dra. Alison: Scottish physician William Pulteney Alison, author of Observations on the Management of the poor in Scotland (1840).
- Not in… gangrene: not in occasional strong outbreaks but in a continual state of decay. Gangrene is the decay of tissue caused by the lack of blood flow to a particular part of the body.
- byword: a topic of gossip.
- Potosi: a South American city known for its large reserves of silver and other valuable resources.
- Stockport Assizes: The superior court in the city of Stockport in northwestern England.
- libra 3 8s.: an abbreviation meaning “three pounds, eight shillings”— about $16 in the exchange rate of the day.
- Plethoric: overabundant; excessive.
- Garnitures: furnishings; ornaments.
- If we… dyspeptic stomach: If we move beyond the upset stomach.
- Guineas: British gold coins worth 21 shillings (a pound and a shilling).
- No whit: not a bit.
- fifty-pound tenants: renters who paid 50 pounds a year to rent land from the wealthy landowner (“master-unworker”).
- Corn Law: The Corn Laws limited the import of cheaper foreigner grain into Britain. By limiting food supplies and keeping grain prices artificially high, these laws increased poverty and hurt the poor.